The Rise of Surveillance Capitalism

thank you all for coming out tonight my name is Betsy Reid I'm editor-in-chief of the intercept and I am honored and thrilled to be bringing you this event tonight we were overwhelmed with the immediate response to it and not surprised given the spectacular lineup and the timely incredible urgency and timeliness of the topic but still heartened that there's so much interest out there in it so the intercept was founded in part as a platform for reporting on the disclosures of NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden these were stories of course that shook the world revealing the extent of government surveillance surveillance of our most intimate lives and the tariffs a terrifying capacity that had developed like under our noses without our knowledge and it was the insidious alliance of government and industry in constructing the new surveillance state that was one of the most chilling revelations of the Snowden archive today we're still at the intercept we're still obsessed with the sort of steady drip of alarming news about encroachments on privacy and we have a special focus on the ways the tech giants are winnowing into our private lives while disguising their agenda in this Orwellian fashion using the benevolent grandiose language of wanting only to make our lives better this is an actual quote from one Silicon Valley startup guide they want to augment the human condition for a huge number of people in a meaningful way so you know we believe it's very vital to report on you know the latest news about Facebook or Google and the way they're profiting from their ability to predict our behavior but we also recognize that it's not enough and that at a moment like this we really need to appreciate the magnitude of the changes that are going on around us we don't want to be like the proverbial frog that is steeped in water gradually getting warmer and not realizing that it's reached the boiling point so this is where Shoshana Zubov comes in we are here tonight to discuss her I think it's fair to say Magisterial knew work the age of surveillance capitalism the fight for a human future at the new frontier of power I'll leave it to Shoshana and Naomi to show you how brilliant and revelatory this book is but I want to tell you that it's really worth grabbing a copy for yourself if you haven't already and several friends because it's not only gorgeously written but this will actually augment the human condition for a huge number of people in a meaningful way if you read it Shoshana is the Charles Edward Wilson professor emeritus at the Harvard Business Business School and the author of the highly influential book in the age of the smart machine the future of work and power speaking with Shoshana tonight and introducing her as the intercepts columnist and senior correspondent Naomi Klein naomi is the inaugural gloria steinem endowed chair of media culture and feminist studies at rutgers her most recent book is the battle for paradise which wasn't based in part on her reporting for the intercept about Puerto Rico in the aftermath of Hurricane Maria she's also of course the author of many best-selling books including the Shock Doctrine no logo and this changes everything capitalism versus the climate so Naomi first talked about the idea for this event quite recently so I'm grateful for everyone at the intercept that pulled it off to bring it to you tonight and to the Internet Society which stepped up to sponsor the livestream and to bring it to hopefully thousands more people from the moment we began discussing it I was struck by how perfect it would be to have these two truly great minds in a live dialogue precisely because of their extremely rare ability to zoom out and see the big patterns that it's so easy to miss so that we can better understand and resist the forces that are constraining our ability to control our own lives and our future and the future of this society and the planet so I'm thrilled that we're about to see them together in action over to Naomi [Applause] Hey [Applause] everybody Wow it's so great to be with you so good to be with you thank you Betsy the entire amazing team at the intercept and all of you for being here tonight here's the plan Shoshana Zubov is gonna come up here and she's going to speak for about 20 minutes about the book now as some of you have noticed and we I already met somebody who had the very bright idea of just bringing the cover of the book to get signed this is not a short book so Shoshana is barely gonna have time to scratch the surface and by the way that is not a diss I write door stoppers as well sometimes there's a reason so after after that I'm going to come back onstage and interview a professor Zubov so that she can go into more depth and she'll be able to do in that short overview and as I'm asking questions some of you will undoubtably be raging at all of the critical questions that I am failing to ask about and that's good because after we finish up there's going to be a mic in the aisle and you will have your chance and after that there will also be a chance to have your books or your book covers signed onstage by Professor Zubov so as Betsy said this is an extraordinary book and it comes just in the nick of time while there is still a small window to resist the dangerous trends that it drags into the light I read the age of surveillance capitalism about four months ago before the official release because I'm one of the blurb errs on the back and being an early reader was a joy and a privilege it meant that I had time to think about it process it put it on my reading list for my course but it was incredibly annoying for all of the people I live and work with because for several months all I could do was harangue them about how they simply had to read this book in order to have informed conversations about anything but of course they couldn't read the book and I sure as hell wasn't going to lend them my copy so I know this sounds a tad hyperbolic but this is the kind of book that has become very rare in our culture because it is the kind of book that takes time time to research time to think time to structure and time to carefully write and that means time out of the constant chatter that makes up the data flows that are the raw inputs of the new economy that this book so chillingly documents the age of surveillance capitalism was seven years in the making and many more years in developing an intellectual framework in which to place that research so the main thing that I want to stress tonight is that although this is a book about a business model forged by the tech sector it is not a tech book it is a book about us our society our democracy our freedoms our sense of self and our futures it would have been enough if professor Zubov had simply mapped that this new landscape for us and told us how it emerged and she does both of those things in tremendous depth and with amazing lucidity of thought and prose but she does more than that she also wrestles with these thorny or philosophical questions of autonomy and self hood and what it means for humans to lose access to knowledge about how our world works the most crucial tool of self-determination it's a very fortunate thing when a book of this caliber arrives at the precise historical moment when the public is ready to receive it and I do believe that we are in a moment like that the signs are the new people's rebellion against the totalizing power of big tech are all around us more and more people are questioning the impact of social media on their mental health well-being labor and leisure and since 2006 and the 2016 and the Cambridge analytical revelations we are wrestling with what it means for democracy we see the new mood of resistance inside tech tech companies and on the streets outside we see it in a wave of tech worker organizing from warehouses of Amazon two workers at a very high level organizing to refuse to build the technology of weaponized surveillance for instance the technology that would enable companies to work with the Pentagon to improve their targeting of drone strikes and I think of enormous significance is the fact that this past November 20,000 Google employees from Singapore to Dublin stunned the world by walking off the job a mass in the Google work out in the Google walkout which was sparked by sexual harassment but involved many of these other issues around workplace rights and democracy and it's often not mentioned that in the historic West Virginia teachers strike the one that happened last year and inspired this wave of teacher organizing that we're still in the midst of the issue was not only a lack of funding for public schools though it was certainly that those teachers also went on strike over surveillance capitalism the fact the fact that they were being told to download an app to their phones that would measure how many steps they took and that would impact the salaries that they were able to take home and they drew a line and they said no and there are many more examples of people drawing these kinds of lines but we are gathered here in New York City the city that dare to stand up to Amazon and say no no we will not hand you billions of dollars in tax breaks so that you can further gentrify our city continue to exploit workers and collaborate with ice in its machinery of deportation and Shoshanna and I are going to talk about that fateful decision friends we are in a moment one that was waiting for its lexicon waiting for its map and it has arrived please join me in thanking professor Zubov for her many years of careful and tenacious labor and in welcoming her to the stage tonight thank you is this not this is on thank you so much I couldn't be more grateful to see you all out here this evening Friday night party night and you're here with us so well there's always the after party thank you so much for coming you know I want to start out by just asking you a question I want to hear a little bit about what brought you to this event tonight and then hopefully reflect on that together for just a moment then I'm gonna shout out some headlines just some some of the the top line ideas that come from the book that we'll be able to dig in in more detail with Naomi and then if there's time I'm hoping to read you a couple of paragraphs from the book that I'm I'm kind of fond of and and I thought I'd really like to share with you tonight so let me start out by asking you a question first of all I need a scribe I need a volunteer to be a scribe is there anyone who has a pencil and paper handy or they could be a scribe for me come on baby don't be shy Oh perfect front row and everything okay you are elected what is your name sir David thank you so much all right I'll tell you your task in just a minute David okay so what I'd like you to do is think about what brought you out here hi everybody up there what brought you out what brought you out here tonight what brought you out here tonight what what concern what question what feeling what brought you out here tonight and just contemplate that for a moment and then reduce that to one word I just want to get that down to one word and when you've got that word please shout it out and David's gonna write it down okay here we go go ahead fear what fear privacy intrusion what came over here paranoia solidarity responsibility [Music] democracy empowerment behavior how are you doing David all right so all right let's let's cut David some slack here wave late right yeah all right are you caught updated empowerment democracy paranoia fear yep okay we're good then it slavery defense what was that what is free free collaboration parasites corporatization okay let's like David catch up revolution that's a good one tell me when you get to revolution wait a minute tell me when you get to revolution David okay good all right well what is that understanding okay resistance alright I think I think we're I think we're getting the gist so here's what I want to share with you these are very important and evocative words and they bear right down to the center of our lives don't they the way I look at it the Titanic struggles of capital in the 20th century bore down on the economic domain they bore down on our workplaces and they bore down on us in our economic roles as consumers and as employees as workers in our era in our time these Titanic struggles of capital are not just bearing down on the economic domain they bear down fully on society on the social domain on our bodies on our everyday lives in our homes in our cars on our streets in our cities they are part of the fabric of our everyday life out of the economic domain into the social domain bearing down on our very bodies in our lives they call us users what does that even mean could there be a less meaningful word on earth they call us users but here's something I want to tell you I brought this for you so I've been in well you know my book was published a few weeks ago early January mid January I've been on the road pretty much all that time so I've been in three countries six cities and I started asking this question of my audience is pretty early on in all these different locales let me tell you what other people said when I asked them this question other groups sovereignty determinism fear resistance inequality bias revolution dignity autonomy democracy manipulation another group anxiety manipulation control identity freedom resistance power democracy law you hear the echoes they call us users and yet here we are across countries across cities experiencing so many of the same concerns I say we are not users I say we are bound in new psychological social political as well as economic interests that we have not yet invented the words to describe the ways that we are bound we have not yet invented the forms of collective action to express the interest that and that that is a big part of the work that must follow in this year and the next year and the year after that if we are to ultimately interrupt an outlaw what I view as the pernicious rogue capitalism that has no business dominating our society all right in the year 1833 in Britain as industrial capitalism was just emerging when they talked about the social hierarchy in Britain they had two terms the aristocracy and the lower classes there was no one else so whether you were a banker or a pauper a merchant whatever you were all part of the lower classes I submit to you that that is a parallel to the term users we are just right now in this catch-all of the lower classes but soon what will emerge is what emerged a century ago the idea that there are workers that there are laborers that they have interests and that they will organize around those interests that there are consumers and they have interests and they will act according to their interests consumers perpetrated the American Revolution laborers fought for enfranchisement and the establishment of real democracy in Britain these were powerful roles and we will find our own what is surveillance capitalism surveillance capitalism diverges from the history of capitalism in many many ways but here in this big pattern it follows the history of capitalism let me describe it this way throughout capitalism as historians have observed throughout its history capitalism claims things that live outside the market dynamic and it brings them into the market dynamic so that they can become commodities to be sold and purchased everybody understands this right industrial capitalism claimed nature for the market dynamic that it could be reborn as real estate as land to be sold to be purchased it claimed work for the market dynamic that it could be reclaimed as Labor wage labor to be sold and purchased surveilance capitalism follows in this in this pathway but with a dark and strange twist because now surveillance capitalism went in search of the last virgin wood and what it found was private human experience and what it does is to unilaterally claim private human experience for the market dynamic that it can be reborn as behavioral data private human experience claimed as a free source of raw material to be reborn as behavioral data in the logic of surveillance capitalism these behavioral data are sent into its production processes elaborate supply chains that capture these behavioral data from every aspect of our lives and activities channel these data into new production processes that are called what artificial intelligence machine intelligence all of that and out of this black box emerges surveillance capitalism's products its products are predictions I call them prediction products they are predictions of our behavior predictions of what we will do now soon and later turns out many many businesses have an interest in this knowledge and these new businesses form a new kind of marketplace that trades exclusively in these predictions call them behavioural futures now as everybody knows this whole logic was born and raised in the context of online targeted advertising and for a long time we thought oh this is online targeted advertising this is the only way advertising can be in the digital and we adapted and found ways to live with this idea of targeted ads but what we really didn't think about was the way in which online targeted advertising represents this sequence that I've just described to you in this case what Google learned to do was to predict a piece of future behavior namely a click-through rate probability that's a piece of future behavior and what those advertisers are buying in their ad auctions is essentially they're making bets on these predictions of future behavior that's how it works this logic this economic logic born in Google elaborated in Google becoming successful in Google only did we learn how successful when Google IPO in the year 2004 and we discovered that in 1986 when it's sorry 1996 when its revenues were 86 million I knew there was an 86 in there its revenues were 86 million between that year and 2004 when its revenues were 3.2 billion it actually increased its revenue line by three thousand five hundred and ninety percent on the strength of these discoveries and this economic logic so as we begin to understand the economic logic that's part of the work of my book as we begin to understand its economic imperatives what happens is we begin to walk back from the Wonderland in which they have put us and as we Alice went through the looking glass into the Wonderland we get to walk back backwards through the looking glass out of the Wonderland into the real world where we can start to see things clearly without the fog of rhetoric and obfuscation and euphemism mendacity and misdirection that have become second nature to the propagandists of surveillance capitalism and as we walk back we start to see some things like for example we thought that they were free that their products and services were free for us but all the time that we're thinking that they're free they're thinking that we're free we're the free raw material get them engaged get them engaged get them engaged keep that data flowing keep it flowing get them engaged anywhere and everywhere it doesn't matter call it a car call it a house call it a digital assistant call it a thermostat call it a search engine it doesn't matter call it social media doesn't matter get him engaged keep the data flowing complex supply chains flowing to production we thought mmm we were using social media but social media was using us we thought we were searching Google but Google was thank you we thought that these companies had privacy policies but in fact these companies have surveillance policies and we became all too vulnerable to something that they told us over and over and over again if you have nothing to hide you have nothing to worry about when the fact is and how many of us have lost our bearings on this when the fact is that if you have nothing to hide then you are nothing because everything that you are the place inside you your inner resources from which you draw your sense of identity your sense of voice your sense of autonomy and moral judgment your ability to think critically to resist even to revolt these are the capabilities that can only be grown within jean-paul sartre calls it the will to will and that will to will grows from within and you should hide it and you should cherish it and it should be private and it should be yours so they've destabilized our moral bearings and our sense of self and what we discover when we learn about the economic imperatives of surveillance capitalism is that these imperatives it's not that there are all bad people in these companies these imperatives compel these corporations they compel these corporations to enter a collision course with democracy a collision course with democracy and happens from below and it happens from above from below do democracy is diminished because ultimately surveillance capital is discovered in the heat of competition that the most powerful predictive data come from actually influencing our behavior towards its preferred outcomes we'll talk more about that with Naomi but just let me give you that top line for now to say that in order to fulfill its own economic imperatives surveillance capitalism must undermine human autonomy it must rob us of decision rights over our own private experience that 15-5 left ok good to know so from below it's eroding autonomy it's eroding the principles of individual sovereignty because it's eroding our decision rights our control over our own experience its boundaries its inwardness I call these the right to the future tense and the right to sanctuary these are being eroded from below and without these a flourishing democratic society is impossible but it also challenges democracy from above because it means that we enter the 21st century and all of us are already preoccupied stressed worried being activists writing thinking helping doing what whatever we can to figure out how we move past the pernicious economic inequality that has scarred our societies but now surveillance capitalism means that we enter the 21st century with a wholly new axis of social inequality imposed upon us and this is the inequality of knowledge because with these practices that I have just briefly described so far what we see is under the aegis of private capital and specifically private surveillance capital these companies take control of 21st century society sporting asymmetries of knowledge unlike anything the world has seen asymmetries of knowledge they know so much about us we know so little about them we do not know about us what they know about us they have so much knowledge that is from us but that knowledge is not for us these asymmetries of knowledge produce equally pernicious asymmetries of power the power that accrues from this knowledge specifically and I hope we get into this discussion with Naomi specifically the power to command the digital media to command this capital intensive ubiquitous digital infrastructure that now saturates our lives to command that in order to not only know us track us monitor us from where we are and where we go to our posture and our gait and our faces and the muscles that express themselves in our faces and give away our emotions of finding our personality profiles in the exclamation points and bullet points that we leave in our online posts but they go beyond that to influence and modify our behavior at the scale of populations what is this power this power to actually influence populations unauthorized self-regulated without democracy's oversight without democracy's participation without our knowledge systems that are specifically engineered to keep us in ignorance systems that are specifically engineered and celebrated for their ability to bypass our awareness ergo my friends surveillance capitalism it's not a word chosen lightly it's a word chosen because this capital cannot accumulate without the social relations of the one-way mirror because when we know about it and if we have a choice they are over all right I was going to close with the reading of just a couple of paragraphs do you think I still have time for that Thomas alright I'll let you be my guide on that there are a couple of paragraphs that I wanted to read you but before I do that I just want to check and see if it's going to be relevant relevant to all of us so let me ask you a couple of quick questions first of all could you just raise your hand how many people in the room have children okay thank you and how many people in the room are under the age of 35 okay thank you so what I'm concluding here is that everybody in the room either has children or is children so I think I'm gonna be okay I think I'm gonna sit down to to read to you and I'm choosing these chapters by the way you know as I'm turning to the last pages of my book I just thought you might be interested in knowing that despite how fat and heavy it is it's only 524 pages in one paragraph because look all of this is endnotes it's very well researched five hundred and twenty four pages that's just a long weekend all right I want to read you these pages because I dedicated this book to my children I'm so proud that my children are here tonight Chloe and take max men love you so much this book would not exist without you your inspiration and your help and my second son King in Woodward who's here tonight came up from North Carolina to surprise me I'm so happy that canyons here I wrote this for my children and for all the children for all the young people and my children's generation because you're gonna be in the front lines of this like so many other messes that you are inheriting and I apologize for that and I wrote this book for you as a way of perhaps making some amends when I speak to my children or an audience of young people I try to alert them to the historically contingent nature of the thing that has us and I do this by calling attention to ordinary values and expectations before surveillance capitalism began its campaign of psychic numbing it is not okay to have to hide in your own life it is not normal I tell them it is not okay to spend your lunchtime conversations comparing software that will camouflage you and protect you from continuous unwanted invasion five trackers blocked four trackers blocked 59 trackers blocked facial features scrambled voice disguised I tell them that the word search has meant a daring existential journey not a finger tap to already-existing answers that friend is an embodied mystery that can only be forged face to face and heart to heart and that recognition is the glimmer of homecoming we experience in our beloved's face not facial recognition I say that it is not okay to have our best instincts for connection empathy and information exploited by a draconian quid pro quo that holds these goods hostage to the pervasive strip-searched of our lives it is not okay for every move emotion utterance and desire to be catalogued manipulated and then used to surreptitiously herd us through the future tense for the sake of someone else's profit these things are brand-new I tell them they are unprecedented you should not take them for granted because they are not okay if democracy is to be replenished in the coming decades it is up to us to rekindle the sense of outrage and loss over what has been taken from us in this I do not mean only our personal information what is at stake here is the human expectation of sovereignty over one's own life and authorship over one's own experience was what is at stake is the inward experience from what which we form the will to will and the public spaces to act on that well what is at stake is the dominant principle of social order in an information civilization and our rights as individuals and societies to ask the key questions in an information civilization who knows who decides who knows who decides who decides who knows these are the questions of knowledge authority and power that will determine the nature of our 21st century society and the digital future that waits in store thank you thank you that was wonderful that idea of hiding in your own life I think we should really hold on to and I think it shows the extent to which this really has colonized the culture that this is taken for granted to create multiple accounts online assuming one is gonna be under surveillance from employers decades in the future and another one that is expressing your real self to carve yourself up like that at the age of eleven you know it's extraordinary so you put surveillance capitalism within this arc of history of capitalism and the history of enclosure and really starting with the enclosure of the original Commons right of common land and the dispossession of the British peasantry and so as I've been trying to talk about this book I talk about this as the is this the final stage of the enclosure process first the enclosure of land and labor then the our lifetime the neoliberal period the swallowing of the public sphere education libraries health care the marketization of every aspect of life and now our most intimate personal interactions our imaginations our very selves is there a stage after this well you know I think a lot about why these why these guys are so interested in outer space you know it's it's like a disease you know let's get another planet start all over again so I you know I I say that with a little bit of tongue-in-cheek but not entirely you know they are there there are new frontiers being anticipated and and when it comes to our private experience as the virgin wood I'm hoping that it is the case you know I say in the very end of the book the Gilded Age for all of its destructiveness and violence it was ended it was in the larger scheme of things a relatively short age and so made the age of surveillance capitalism be a short age as we begin to activate the the measures activate the resources of our democratic institutions activate the competitive solutions that will enable us to interrupt an outlaw the most pernicious aspects of surveillance capitalism so so there will have to be other frontiers and I'm sure they will find them but the but the other possibility here Naomi that perhaps is relevant I'll just mention it and you decide if you want to dig deeper is that you know I still believe that there are competitive solutions you know that I believe that democracy is the is the first stop here that we've that we've got to double down on democracy if we're gonna if we're gonna get over and around surveillance capitalism but but in doing that we're opening space for competitive solutions solutions within capitalism solutions within capitalism that that not all capitalism you know is is based on illegitimate dispossession in this way in the sense that we can we can imagine a form of information capitalism that actually you know carefully builds a new kind of institution that is aligned with democratic principles that is subjected to democratic oversight that is that is aligned with the true needs of populations and is for us not just about us and and therefore I can imagine the founding of alternative eco systems where there still is a role for Commerce in the connected sphere not the entire connected sphere owned and operated by private capital but there is a role and that that could be a far more a healthy role one that actually serves us in a positive way well I mean that gets pretty quickly into a deep debate about capitalism I wasn't planning to get into this early conversation because I'm not so sure I agree with that but but there are a few pieces of that I do want to pick a prime part because I mean I can certainly imagine ways of interacting with technology that are both profitable for corporations and are not based on surviellance capitalism right I mean I would argue that they're extractive in other ways you know if we're talking about like Apple as an example of a company that doesn't yeah you know that so but but broader but more broadly right absolutely there are ways that that we could ban certain practices and I think we definitely want to get into that more deeply of what what the kind of democratic solutions are to this but all of this ultimately is about resolving a crisis within capitalism the crisis of growth and every one of these stages of enclosure that we've been talking about were always about trying to resolve a crisis within capitalism of stagnation and the need the bill to need within capitalism to have these bubbles now surveillance capitalism is the new bubble right dad is the new bubble all of this behavioural doubt is the new bubble but one of the most interesting parts of your book to me I mean all of it was interesting but was your narrative of how this was born in crisis right this twin crisis of the dot-com bubble bursting and there needing to be a business model right and all of these surveillance capitalism companies they never had a business model within capitalism right they offered a free product got a ton of quote unquote users and then figured out how to mine the data right but they were fictitious companies before they figured out how to do it or at least not sustainable by the markets own terms right so I would love just for you to talk more about the role of crisis in the birth of surveillance capitalism the.com bubble bursting and 9/11 these twin crises and how that produced this moment well you're absolutely right the Shock Doctrine was put to good use in the birth of surveillance capitalism in a couple of ways first of all some of you may know that you know the Google founders were were very explicit early on about their antipathy toward advertising they thought online advertising would not only disfigure the Internet but it would destroy the integrity of their search engine there were about seven people in the early Google that were dedicated to the advertising function and even those seven people hated advertising or at least most of them were on record as being embarrassed about advertising then came the shock the.com bubble bursting and of course that was pandemonium in Silicon Valley smart companies that had incredible products and services but that weren't yet capitalists because they hadn't figured out how to make money so in the heat of emergency under the pressure financial emergency excuse me and its own venture capitalists threatening to pull out support the founders of Google did a vault fast they decided that we've got to save the company at any price they had their personal motivations for doing so and and the idea here was in the heat of emergency they decided to use data that had been left over collateral behavioral data produced while people searched and browsed and so forth sitting in logs not used called waste called data exhaust and all those kinds of terms and they decided people had been fooling around with some of those data logs discovered that there was predictive value in those data so in this emergency that's when they decided to pull those data now mind you the users who provided those data didn't know that they had done that didn't know that there was predictive behavioral data about them sitting around someplace they decided to use these data to combine them with they're already even in the years 2000 2001 you know they were already at the frontier of computational capabilities in Silicon Valley and indeed and you know basically on planet Earth so don't forget they'd come up through the computer science department at Stanford and you know they were brilliant so out of this black box of the data and the computation they were able to produce a new kind of prediction as I mentioned earlier that they could sell to advertisers and so instead of advertisers choosing where they put their ads now advertisers would just you know buy the thing that the Machine spit out and Google said you know we're not going to tell you how we got that answer but if you just accept the answer you will make a lot of money and as I told you the numbers before they did make a lot of money so so there's one part of the shock that actually drove open the door to the discovery and elaboration and institutionalization of this new economic logic i suspended their own principles in order to accomplish this because it was survival the other shock that i think you're referring to is the whole war on terror that became part of the historical context in which this new model was born so obviously surveillance capitalism invented essentially in 2001 the same year as the tragedies of 9/11 we know from the record that literally even on September 10 I mean this was a period where the FTC had already decided that the online companies these new Internet companies were not going to be able to successfully self-regulate they were already the FTC was already fighting the whole Cookies phenomenon when cookies were still something to be fighting over probably some people in this room weren't even born then you know but cookies were outrageous and then there were things called web bugs which were little little digi things that were sort of buried in a page and also tracked you and there were these amazing you know cybersecurity people back in the late 90s who were writing incredible things about web bugs just the kind of thing that I find myself writing about today so the FTC was already onto this and they believed that we were gonna have to have comprehensive privacy legislation in this country and some drafts on this and proposals for this we're already circulating in Congress on September 10th and that was the big conversation when it came to the Internet September 11th everything changed and the people who were there on site you know talk about it changed in our change in 24 hours and now the preoccupation was Total Information Awareness and for Total Information Awareness as we know you need surveillance and even though you know these new inventions this the the economic logic that I call surveillance capitalism wasn't yet public so it's not like the folks in Washington actually already knew you know what Google was was about to become but what they did know was that they were getting data from people and they did know that they were really smart and they had computers and they knew how to do things with those data that others didn't yet know how to do and so there was a sense that one can track and trace and I do believe that it there is much more here under the hood for historians to discover that these stories have not all been excavated these stories have not yet all been told but we we can see enough to know that to know that there was an effort to kind of incubate and nurture Google and some of the other fledgling companies efforts coming from the Defense Department and from the intelligence agencies and even you know NSA documents that were all about you know all about Google here hero-worship of Google and asking how do we become more like Google so I call this whole complex surveillance exceptionalism the idea that we're gonna you know the idea of redlining but here is like the positive redlining we're gonna redline these companies and protect them buffer them from law buffer them from impediment nurture them as we can and also we're gonna like do a lot of house parties together you know everybody knows about the revolving door between especially Google and the Obama administration the Obama White House but in more in general between silicon and and Washington so those staff people were just going back and forth with jobs and you know jobs and wine jobs in the other and also they made themselves the Silicon Valley folks starting with Google made themselves essential in electoral politics you know they developed Obama's 2008 campaign they made the difference that made the difference yeah definitely pay attention to this and the electoral cycle if who's getting these flows yeah who's getting these lows but it is interesting I mean it's so striking that there was this moment where they might have acted as regulators as they might have lived up to their responsibilities to protect people's privacy and then they see themselves actually as partners in this project and I mean that's the the piece of it that's I think particularly scary is that it's not sort of is it are we more scared of surveillance by the state or are we more scared of corporate surveillance when really it is this Nexus that where it was born in this nexus and in some countries the Nexus is very clear like China and India where it's totally integrated the state surveillance and corporate surveillance it's it's the same machine and you know I think it it shows maybe the stakes of this but the flip side of it that's so weird is this narrative out there of oh you know the politicians are just so clueless and they're just so old they could never regulate Facebook and you know and that's spectacle on Capitol Hill Mark Zuckerberg going there and basically you know being asked by senators like for help with their AOL right was like it was such a gift to Facebook because it reinforced this narrative of you're just too complicated too far ahead of politics to ever be regulated right but then how do we match that with our understanding that actually they've been in bed together the entire time and let's keep in mind what the real bedrock utilities were here in this relationship the utilities were if you're doing if you're developing these camp in this country you're developing these capabilities in the of it sector you are not limited by the United States Constitution you're developing these capabilities in the private sector you're not limited by law in the same way that even ultimately the intelligence agencies are accountable to law it may take us a while but ultimately they are accountable so this was the perfect solution in in our society to allow these capabilities to flourish in a place where they didn't have to answer to the Constitution and therefore to have all of those data there all of those surveillance capabilities so that when we really need them in Washington we just take that big straw you know and we dip in so it's like we're harboring all the stuff there and when we need it it's there for us and of course we learned that with Snowden we learned that about the prism the prism situated the project that that's exactly what they were doing this kind of symbiosis now you you've used this phrase a couple times tonight this that we are the Virgin Wood and this this historical analogy with capital with colonialism and in the book you go deeper into it and and I would just ask you to talk about the requirement owes and the and the parallel with today so I think it's so interesting okay well I do write about you know I write about the phenomenon of the unprecedented the unprecedented when you really encounter something that is unprecedented in your experience it is almost impossible to recognize it it's it's like you can't actually see it because when you when you encounter something unprecedented you're looking for things out of your experience things that are already familiar to you as as a way of grasping of taking in what you're actually seeing so you know I for example the whole idea of the horseless carriage right so if you got an automobile which is a wholly new thing quite unprecedented and for a long time people called it a horseless carriage rubra sizing it you know to stuff that was familiar that's how the unprecedented works like I try to think about the unprecedented a lot and I've spent a good part of my life in South America and I'm I'm these countries that are very dear in my heart and I think a lot about the first indigenous peoples and what was their encounter with the first Spaniards that they ever saw and you know there are accounts where they see these ships and they think that there are mountains riding on the Seas and then these strange men with their hair and their beards in their broke aids and their armors and they think there's some kind of God's coming down from these mountains that somehow ride on the sea so this shock of the unprecedented and obviously the the the the interaction of the Spanish conquistadores and their impact on the indigenous peoples this is the most painful history to read of history of death and destruction of murder of just unimaginable cruelty and so I honor that I recognize that but there are some strange things about the the sort of niceties of the conquistadores that fascinated me for example back in the court of Isabel and Ferdinand they decided that you know we're gonna take these peoples lands and their gold and everything else their lives and their labor but we want to do it legally we it would be nice to do it legally should be some kind of it should be legal let's let's make it legal so they needed a way to make it legal so the the monarchs put their head together with the Pope and their lawyers and they came up with something called the decay demon thong which is an edict written in Castilian Spanish of the 15th century and intended to be read to the villagers and it goes on and on in legalese in the name of the queen and the king and the Pope we take you and your lands and so forth and then it you know it goes all around and then at the very end it basically says and if you don't agree then we have the right to burn and pillage and rob and steal and kill and maim and all the things that they indeed did - it's a language that is not understood by the people that presents so they come to the village and they pull out the edict and they read it in Castilian Spanish - indigenous peoples who think that they're looking at some kind of strange gods that have emerged from somewhere across the horizon who have no idea of course what they're saying and the one monk who bears witness to these - these things Bartolome he says that he never saw any translator there any effort to translate is this reminding you of anything because it should be every time you click that little box I agree and they say well they agreed to it and you hear Eric Schmidt with that little that little mantra and we will take and know everything about you with your permission and we will take your life and know everything about you and about your friends and about where you're coming and where you're going with your permission of course and permission is that little tick and that little tick what are we ticking on we're ticking on the 21st century version of the decay mento the legal edict that we cannot understand written in a language designed to keep us ignorant along with so many other things about their practices I mean it it certainly makes you think a little harder on move fast and break things you know and this whole this whole model of getting offense and break things was an an accident that he ever said it because it was one of the few times that he told the truth and we just thought he was being cute but another part of the book that I found really fascinating in terms of this kind of very colonial facts on the ground strategy about running any kind of accountability just just moving so quickly that it's in place and then you have to undo if you're gonna respond if you're gonna respond to it is the story of Street View or Google Earth or whatever it's called okay because it just seems so so deliberate but I I mean I I'm living here now but I'm from Toronto so I need you to talk about sidewalk labs as the ultimate facts on the ground strategy as well okay okay alright we've got a lot of work today all right let's see if I can talk fast so so what Naomi is referring to is I spent many years just reading about every time especially Google but also Facebook you know they did something and everybody got outraged you know like everybody got outraged about Cambridge analytic and for a long time now we've been focused on Facebook and there are many scandals erupting from Facebook literally it seems like almost every hour these days but you know certainly almost every day and definitely almost every week I brought some with me just to show you if we got bored but so so what I noticed is that there is a cycle here that they have perfected the first part of the cycle is the incursion so this is the conquistadores they're just coming in no one's going to stop them because no one even has a clue what they're doing let alone what kind of destruction is going to be down the so they're just marching in I call this first phase incursion all right and then ultimately somebody is gonna say something somebody is gonna push back right so this happened a couple weeks ago maybe some of you read about it somebody blew the lid off the fact that the nest nest makes smart-home devices nest is owned by Google nest nest security system it was discovered I think I'm February 5th maybe a little bit later it has a microphone buried in it oops and what it Google's say oh we meant to tell you that we forgot to tell you yeah there's a there's a microphone in it we thought maybe that would come in handy later when you want to use Google home to tell us everything so here's a security system that's supposed to keep the burglar out your nest later by the way would you say hammers to your nest cameras yeah so the security system is supposed to keep the burglars out actually the burglars are the security system so no so now you see this these phases kicking in right because the so first they just took it that was incursion they put the microphone there they didn't care they weren't asking permission okay now we find out about it so now it's like all the flim-flam og yeah we meant to tell you oh gosh yeah we forgot to put it in the schematic so sorry about that this will go back and forth there will be lawsuits it will go back and forth this is called the habituation stage of dispossession because they want this to last as long as possible this next stage because eventually it goes on for a few years and then we forget why we were so upset about it in the first place what was it about us about that microphone and then then finally some lawsuits you know come to fruition and so forth then they agreed to make adaptation so now we're in the adaptation stage and so they change the name they change something and then of course the next stage you can probably guess what the next stage is redirection turns out that adaptation was good for about 32 seconds because sometimes the very next day like when they had to shut down Google Buzz because all of the outrage over making all the social relationships public without anybody's consent they shut down Google Buzz and literally the next day the New York Times announced Google+ and then as the forensic people started getting into Google+ they discovered that they had switched it over so quickly from Buzz that some of the text and some of the URLs hadn't even been changed in the in the background material all right Street View was one of these par excellance that drove through these stages Street View they're driving around in the little cars to map everything why are they going to map everything they're gonna map everything because they know that pretty soon getting our data from the online milieu is not going to be enough they needed data at scale they needed volumes of data to feed those machines for good predictions but ultimately as a competitive competitive dynamic intensified they understood that they also need varied data varieties of data not only scale but also scope and this meant driving us out of the online environment into the world into the real world with our phones and and it was gonna mean driving us through the streets into our homes in our cars they needed the maps they needed to map the real world so that they could help us navigate through it in a way that would profit them so Street View and it was in the city of Hamburg in Germany that the data protection supervisor there discovered that these Street View cars cute little cars were actually scraping the family's private data off of its Wi-Fi system and bundling it into the so-called Street View data that it was collecting outraged outraged outraged outraged in Germany outraged all over the world hundreds of lawsuits ultimately they you know dealt with a situation they dealt with adaptation and in the end nothing changed in the end street view continued street view map the world street view mapped our cities and and our our parks and everywhere else and then they had another thing where they outfitted people with backpacks so that you could climb a mountain go down into the valley go into the Grand Canyon that's where Canyon loves to go go into the Grand Canyon and you map everything for Google with this backpack and then you go into the inside of buildings like these big buildings in New York the malls and the food courts all the interiors of the buildings getting mapped as well it all continued many new names many new new products unabated so can I tell about Pokemon go and then go to Toronto alright and I think I think people want to hear whether you feel like New York dodged a bullet on Amazon because we're here and there's been a lot of recrimination about it since you know originally it was sort of a feeling that it was a people's victory after the fact it was sort of like well you drove away all these good jobs and then there's there's a real debate about whether it would have been possible to drive a good deal a better deal with Amazon what's your take on on this I don't want to say New York dodged a bullet I want to say New York is the bullet [Laughter] you know I see what happened in New York you know in a longer arc to me I'm sure that the arc has antecedents before the what I'm gonna mention as its as its point of origin but but this is this is something that I that I take is very important a moment I guess was around what was it maybe 2011 when a group of Spanish citizens came to their data protection authorities and said that we want these data about us to be erased from the internet and there's no one to call there's no customer service number that's a whole other issue for many years on the landing page for my name where they put that bio box which by the way I find offensive I was I was there listed as the author of a novel called watermelon Knights and the author of the novel watermelon Knights was listed as the author of a book that I wrote that I'm very fond of called the support economy why corporations are failing you in the next episode of capitalism and there's a link and you're supposed to write on the link you know when there's a mistake and I must have done that I don't know five thousand times that's really what motivated you to write this book is this IV fits me it was that it was that and the day I asked a group a group of Google executives how I could opt out of Google Earth well I I didn't get a very good response well we we really do we're kind of out of time but but I don't want to open it up before we talk a little bit about where this resistance which we feel which is beginning where it goes and you know whether or not we have differences on the role of Marcus what the what the business models might be I think that there's clearly a role for the public there's clearly a role for some kind of assertion of a Commons around this and I'd love to hear your thoughts on tools of resistance and also that sort of mix between markets and you know one of the things that I think is interesting about these businesses that don't have didn't have a business model is that in a way they are habituated us not just to this loss of privacy that you've described which they have habituated us to but they also have bitchu ated us to the idea that we have a right to connection information without it being a commodity right I mean that was the whole that that was it that that's what social media has done that's what Google did with search and is there a model on which these are treated as utilities and where or some kind of cooperative ownership I mean we're giving them free content every Twitter user every Facebook use user is actually a producer so are there other ownership models that we should be thinking about absolutely and all I was gonna say before I'll just say very very quickly is there is an arc of resistance and arc and which where you know the whole idea that I first heard about in the context of the fossil fuel divestment movement the idea of withdrawing social sanction from from industries and institutions and the idea now is about withdrawing social sanction from surveillance capitalism and this idea I think began to really be forcefully articulated in Spain with these citizens who demanded the right to be forgotten and ultimately it was that the European High Court that put the decided that the right to be forgotten should be law and I I saw this and I understand this as the beginning of democracy clawing back what surveillance capitalism took in a way that could not simply be redirected that it could no longer be theirs it had to be ours it came back to democracy's domain and out of private surveillance capital's domain and so this is an arc I believe that has been gathering steam that has been gathering people and ideas and intellectual energy and political energy and feeling and the kind of feeling that you brought here tonight is all part of this arc and so what happened in New York and the contest over Amazon was not only about I mean it was about taxes and it was about the housing and it was about all those immediate issues but it was also about no longer accepting that anything goes that all public sacrifices are worthwhile sacrifices for a private actor over which democracy has no control and over which we have no say so that New York has placed itself in that long arc is to me something that makes me very proud as far as as resistance don't get me wrong Naomi I I see the the whole what what is to be done as a three-part a three-part answer the first is the the the sea change in our awareness that is required there we know we can no longer allow ourselves to be ignorant at their hands and as we begin to name and understand what is happening to us a lot of this began with you know Chris Wylie who blew the was Cambridge analytical and opened up a lot to our view that we did not comprehend before and all he was describing was the everyday routine ho-hum please pass the salt operations of a good responsible surveillance capitalist slightly pivoted from commercial to political outcomes that's what Cambridge analytical was and as we begin begin to see the havoc that they were able to wreak with these methods I think we've developed a better appreciation of what these folks are doing in the commercial realm and the power that is accruing to them so it begins with a sea change as we name naming is essential to taming my expectation is that with the sea change in our consciousness we will be pressuring and triggering and mobilizing our political systems the resources of our democracies that must be called to action we already see that now in the UK I'm sure many of you know UK parliamentary committee issued just last week 108 page report that begins with accusing Facebook of behaving as a digital gangster okay when I wrote my book the legal people went through it and they made me take out the word theft right and that was a couple years ago and they went through so digital gangsters those are big words for a parliamentary committee that's part of this sea change all right we need that here you know right now you know here is depressing but that's not gonna last forever we're getting over that we're gonna get past that you know these things go in cycles so this is not the work of a day or a month or a year this is the work of the next decade and I have every confidence that we will do this work number two I opened up on the subject of collective action and this is where other forms of ownership so a century ago you know it was our economic roles that forced us to discover trade unions and collective bargaining and the right to strike the forms of collective action that we brought to bear to rein in the imbalance of power to create a kind of equilibrium however imperfect I'm not an apologist for capitalism I do not believe it is perfect but I do believe that there is an imperfect equilibrium that we call Market Market democracy that can serve society well and what and when we when we look through history and we look around the world for for examples that that have served us well that this stands out as one of them so I believe in that possibility but it has to be democracy tethering the raw excesses of capitalism to the needs of people and society anyway I believe that we will discover the new forms of relevant collective action and we're already seeing this around the world I've just been in in Brussels where I I spent time with Francesca Bria who's the chief technology officer for Barcelona I'm sure some people in this room knows know what's going on in Barcelona where they're you know they're they're trying to do the smart city in the way that we own it that it's our data our lives and our city that the smart city is a democratic municipality it is the citizens city and so yes data data collectives and data Commons and din and and new forms of solidarity that keep data at the center of the public governmental accountability and responsibility as a public good overseen by democracy with citizen participation so you know that work I believe is a is a frontline crucible for what some of these new forms will be and finally there there will be a role for commerce in the connected sphere I mean I don't see that going away what I do see going away is that the whole thing is owned and operated by surveillance capital that you can't get your children's grades from the school without marching through surveillance capitals supply chains that you can't get your health data without marching through its supply chains that you can't plan dinner with your family and friends without marching through its supply chains this is intolerable this is illegitimate this is unacceptable this is a draconian quid pro quo that we should not be forced to make as twenty-first century citizens we can we can easily imagine the digital without surveillance capitalism and back in that window in the early 2000s in the late 1990s when we expected we ran to the digital we ran to Wonderland because of its emancipatory potential democratizing knowledge empowering us helping us to solve problems in our lives that you know we're too harried and burdened and busy and everybody's working and in our kids and school and we need help we ran to the digital for help and it was giving us help until surveillance capitalism and economic logic not the digital not technology not inevitable it was an economic logic that came and infected and hijacked the digital for its own purpose and what just one last time just he's laughing at me the big lie is that this is the only way the digital can work this is not technology this is not inevitable it's an economic logic we've stopped economic logics before we've stopped capitals and before we can do it again thank you [Applause] where's the mic okay great the mic is coming to the aisle so polite there's one there's one mic it's over here sorry the folks up in the balcony it's not fair to you and by the way hi to those all the folks on the livestream I think we've had hey everyone thanks for tuning in shy crowd alright we've got our first question I don't know if you read today's Times Cuomo is trying to get Amazon back and Jeff Bezos actually took his phone call the one state senator I think who was put on a committee that could have stopped it has been taken off that committee so if Amazon does come to Queens I think the fact that originally if they were stopped was a first battle and not the end of the war not the war okay thank you for that hi I'm Delia tanda from company called meta million an Internet foundation we've been working to try and create tools to give people sovereignty control of their data for many years I wanted to ask you about surveillance capitalism versus the surveillance industrial complex and where I'm what I want to understand is the challenge with that I find with surveillance capitalism and this economic logic that you refer to that is touted as the only way forward has has assumes that the why behind all of this is fundamentally economic whereas when you look at the surveillance industrial complex there there are issues around the industrialization of surveillance and you know Naomi made this point earlier about China you look at China for example which spectively isn't a capitalist structure now I know of course that it's still all by money in many senses but the question that I'm trying to get to is that when you look at industrialization and you look at colonialism and centralization the fundamentals about this really is about control and really about the the why at the end of this is really about controlling the masses so my question is when you look at surveillance capitalism versus industrial complex do we miss the grand purpose of this in terms of social control as opposed to simply economic progress does that make sense well this is a really long line grouping a couple questions all right or I could just try to answer it again really quickly it's gonna have a drag these are this is a heavy big question and it's so hard to answer really quickly I apologize in advance but I guess you know bottom line is surveillant the you know the way I write about surveillance capitalism is it yes it begins in the economic domain as as a mode of accumulation not to make us all prosperous but to create prosperity among surveillance capitalist and with their business customers in these new behavioral futures markets that's where that's where the revenue is being generated then you get the the surveillance industrial complex all the vast machinery and facial recognition all the capabilities that are being developed and sold and chanson and the town in the city in China that's famous hub for for these some these devices and technologies and and in China what you see is an authoritarian state now looking at what was its so-called private sector its so-called private Internet companies seeing all the capabilities just like we have here that they have developed and realizing that this is too good to let it be private we're going to annex that to our ambitions and kind of in the spirit of Cambridge analytic I be able to do all the things that the surveillance capitals can do but do them to fulfill social and political outcomes rather than the commercial outcomes that surveillance capitalists are after so these are two different trajectories right now I mean in China they're entirely compatible trajectories I mean they also want you know obedient consumers and laborers yes but I'm just saying that in its in China we see this this apotheosis of the authoritarian state an Xing what I call the instrument Aryan power produced by surveillance capitalism the power to modify population behavior at scale an Xing that for its social and political goals how they want people to behave whereas you know right now in our Miglia this is this is still a private action toward maximizing our behavior for commercial ends not our prosperity but theirs so how do we you know interrupt an outlaw of this before we ever get to a stage where we might enter that zone of the apotheosis you know of this fusion of state state and private power around these capabilities which really is to me the nightmare scenario okay so I'm gonna really ask for everybody's cooperation paint the questions and happiness with short snappy answers okay I'll do my best well first of all thank you for facilitating this discussion I think we're all thinking it and maybe Facebook knows that but it's nice to be somewhere else and talk about it so so my question is I guess originally the the net was about a decentralized network spread across the world and that was going to bring us together and now we have the Tri net which is Facebook Amazon Google and so we have these masses of centralized power which everything passes through so how do we move past that okay well it's short a to big as well it's kind of the subject of the evening so why don't you percolate on that and so well I guess I'm gonna answer it with one word I get it I'm gonna change my whole mo on answer it with one word is that okay democracy okay hi thanks also for being us all for this fantastic talk a quick question we've been talking about Facebook and Amazon as well specifically what I want to ask about is Amazon Web Services I'm sure as you know they host a lot of the most popular services like Netflix so your information goes through them and now not only do they host CIA infrastructure so like a literal fusion of those two but they also excuse me sorry I'm like not as not only do they host the CIA's computers but the very size of Amazon nama has allowed Jeff Bezos to acquire the Washington Post and that kind of relationship between both private and state power and then how that influences supposedly private media and then in their responsibility to a democracy so I did know your thoughts on that and yeah I would say that there's all that this is a very important issue that you're raising that there's much more analysis that needs to be done on it that has been done on it and we you know this gets to the point I was making earlier of how we're entering the 21st century with this disfigured institutional landscape these huge asymmetries of knowledge you know information data information knowledge all of that in ways that are under the private control of surveillance capital and this is this is not the way we want to move through the 21st century toward a democratic future and the kind of digital future that we all hope for so this this is like one example of this larger problem can I say that yes okay thank you I mean a lot of people have books they want it have signs so we are supposed to wrap in like five minutes which is a little bit hard but let's just really try to keep it short do it as many as we can so I just wanted to ask about this particular strain of capitalism and how it seems that it's a little bit immune to market dynamics actually and and so it doesn't matter to a lot of these companies to actually make money these commands on does it actually make a lot of profits that's why they don't pays taxes uber doesn't make money you know a snapchat the CEO said we I I don't have any plans to make money and I I don't care about that so how do you I mean what do you think is going on there and how do you defeat something like that well I mean it's it's not true that they're not making money you know and a misfits okay profits it's not even true that they're not making profits I mean it took amaz Amazon ramped up very slowly Jeff Bezos had a very clear strategy eventually they did get to profitability and it took a long time and he did it the way that he wanted to do it very carefully institutionalizing certain kinds of systems but I think the larger question here is you know what you said like they became so dominant how do you really fight them when they become so dominant it seems like they don't even have any competitors really despite Tim Cook saying you know we want to be different and the thing is what they did when I told you about that Google invention story what they did was instead of figuring out through careful institutionalization how they were gonna make money and actually Amazon did begin its life as a cunning and ruthless capitalists but not necessarily of surveillance capitalists right and he was building an institution in a very deliberate way but in the case of Google and Facebook really they found the sort of straight line as the crow flies to maximum monetization and that became the standard so most startups and apps and all the stuff that is happening in the tech sector emulated them or BK or somehow found a niche in that ecosystem because that was the standard for for generating revenues and ultimately margins and ultimately market capitalization so so the whole thing is like how do you pull it back from that to actually now begin to build the kinds of businesses that use the digital in the way we always imagined it would be used for us to empower us and not just great from us and sell the results to somebody else so you know I think this is this is a new part of the work now - you know pull ourselves away from the from this the addiction to these these these kinds of revenues into something that's more real and sustainable and really moves the dial of economic history thank you you mentioned that this is not the only way for tech to be my question is is this the only way for capitalist tech to be or in other words is the root cause of surveillance capitalism just capitalism I hear that like I mean I don't believe so and I in that you know that may be a controversial point with some folks I don't I don't I'm not a Pollyanna about capitalism but I do believe that there is evidence that we can do capitalism constrained by law capitalism within the frameworks of good regulation that make sure it doesn't go off the rails and some of these ways that we've been discussing into territories that are illegitimate and that there's opportunities for companies to even with actually truly with our permission to gather behavioral data that will improve our lives with our under our control under our Authority and under the aegis of our own power and our own collectivities so I do believe that's possible and many of those plans were underway in the late 90s in the early 2000s before this this straight line to big revenue time minoo was was was cut and and it changed the game for everybody so though there was no longer time to really develop these other pathways in a more scrupulous way that was actually tied to tied to society and tied to our real needs so I do believe that there is room there thank you free I'm gonna get my pajamas for tonight Free Press just released a report I'm sure you're aware and you're cited in it with the new book and the proposal that they're talking about is having creating attacks on surveillance capitalists essentially on targeted targeted ad revenue and using that revenue to fund public journalism so I would love your thoughts on that and whether it's politically viable at this time okay well you know you know I've got all those pages of endnotes there so I'm not a hip shooter and so there's something that I would love to study and get back to you on but in general this is exactly the kinds of stuff that we have to be thinking about because one way that we're going to improve the chances of our democracy is to reinstate the Fourth Estate and the fact that that surveillance capitalism has been able to essentially overtake the Fourth Estate and and fit it into a you know a little box in a newsfeed and your Facebook pages is is one of the great crimes of our time so so I'm really in favor of the innovations that we will come up with as societies to clawback that territory and and reestablish the necessary work of the Fourth Estate for its accountability for the words that it publishes something that we have law and that has been a catastrophic loss for our democracies thank you thank you so much apologies again to everybody who was in line but thank you so much asana for that amazing night and all of you for being here and the intercept for hosting us [Applause]

Channel: The Intercept

Views: 124,808

Keywords: the intercept, Shoshana Zuboff, Surveillance Capitalism

Id: 2s4Y-uZG5zk

Length: 104min 27sec (6267 seconds)

Published: Sat Mar 02 2019